Siege s/c back

It's fast, it's tight and it's the grand finale to everything Bendis has written since AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED.

The Avengers' original antagonist, the Norse trickster Loki, has been sitting through all the Cabals' meetings with palms pressed together, a faint smile playing on his lips. He's been biding his time. Now he allows Norman Osborn to persuade himself that Asgard, floating above America (albeit in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma), is a direct threat to his authority and the security of the United States. But Osborn singularly fails to persuade the American President, and so between the two they goad the voluminous Volstagg, errant Asgardian on a stroll through Chicago, into a moment of mass destruction on the same scale as the Stamford Disaster which ignited CIVIL WAR. As Loki continues to play all sides at once - and against the express wishes of the President - the combined might of the Dark Avengers, the Initiative and the Hood's own gang of supervillains is launched for all-out assault on the floating city of Asgard, little knowing that in the town underneath one Doctor Donald Blake is overseeing a healing Tony Stark under the watchful gaze of a certain World War II Super Soldier returned.

Okay, a little artistic license there, but here's what you want to know: it's a great big fight - your basic, fanboy reward for all those conversations (I liked the conversations, myself, but everyone enjoys a little pudding, don't they?) with several moments of jaw-dropping horror as the real threat lurking within them for quite some time is finally revealed. Because it's not Norman Osborn.

Contains SIEGE: THE CABAL and SIEGE #1-4 as well as the online prologue and the 2009 AVENGERS: FREE COMICBOOK DAY one-shot.